Books, Arts & Manners: Ranck on a Roll

GERALD RANCK began to play the Scarlatti sonatas (Kk 1-30) at 3 in the afternoon of May 10. He took a short intermission after Sonata 18 and at 5:35 he finished Kk 30—superb musical judgment, because the G-minor is played at moderate speed, and so left the audience with a lyrical decompressant after the furies that came immediately before.

It isn’t easy to communicate the hair-raising complexity of so many of the Scarlatti sonatas. There is little to be said for trying to compete with the description of them done by the late Ralph Kirkpatrick, an interpreter and a biographer of Domenico Scarlatti. He wrote:

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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GERALD RANCK began to play the Scarlatti sonatas (Kk 1-30) at 3 in the afternoon of May 10. He took a short intermission after Sonata 18 and at 5:35 he finished Kk 30—superb musical judgment, because the G-minor is played at moderate speed, and so left the audience with a lyrical decompressant after the furies that came immediately before.

It isn’t easy to communicate the hair-raising complexity of so many of the Scarlatti sonatas. There is little to be said for trying to compete with the description of them done by the late Ralph Kirkpatrick, an interpreter and a biographer of Domenico Scarlatti. He wrote: